Sermon: Hope for a Weary World
For years, BVU has been hosting an on-line space for newcomers and volunteers to learn English, now called the English Conversation Circle. These days, the group shares a conversation based on a selected topic, like friendship or the immigration experience, and one of the members said, “Victoria is… a lonely paradise.”
My own family had a discussion about this, and Min-Goo’s words made me smile. “It’s not just the people in Victoria who are lonely. It’s like that everywhere. This place is just a paradise (in nature, to live in).”
The person who said "Victoria is… a lonely paradise,” is a mother with a child who is on the Autism spectrum, an immigrant, a career nurse before coming to Canada.
Look around and see how beautiful the city is. The ocean. The mountains. Douglas fir trees. Cedar-covered hills. Ferns. Deep forest coolness. These days, just going into my house’s small backyard, the air is entirely aromatic, filled with thick blackberry perfume. I could almost feel the blackberry juice embedded in the air and stuck to my cheeks. And, to my relief, it’s already September 3rd, but people aren’t talking about when the weather forecast predicted the first snowfall. (Like in Winnipeg.)
However, since I have heard this shared many times from a variety of people, Victoria is a lonely place, or at least, it’s not easy to make friends. Some people have lived here for 6 years, 10 years, even longer, and still find it hard to say that they have found a community where they feel they belong and are connected heart-to-heart. It often surprises me, because many of them, on the surface, seem to boast a great social network, with connections through work or volunteerism. The question I would like to present to you today, since I am exploring the city, is, what causes such isolation? It is particularly disheartening to listen to these stories, especially when I think about the fact that what allows many of us to be able to move here and settle in this beautiful southern part of the island is material wealth. What’s obvious is that material wealth cannot cure a weary world, while nature can still offer consolation.
Today’s reading is Jesus’ nine Beatitudes with which he affirms that blessed are those who suffer, struggle and strive for healing and wholeness, for the restoration of hope and justice.
“Blessed are those who are poor in spirit.”
“Blessed are those hunger and thirst for righteousness.”
The Gospel of Luke presents a more “raw” version of this affirmation, in which Jesus simply states, “Blessed are those who are hungry, today.”
Blessed are those who are hungry, now.
Usually, those who are afflicted by injustice, disconnection, marginalization, ostracization, poverty, are hidden. Society tucks them away, in hidden corners. Their suffering is spoken of quietly. The problems that cause such afflictions often become the elephant in the room. Marked as “extraordinary”, outside of us, these folks are labeled as shameful, stigmatized. They are forced into the shadows, vulnerable to mainstream society’s narratives and biases. They share the same physical paradise as us, but they live in a very weary world.
In today’s reading, Jesus and his disciples, and the crowds sitting with Jesus’ community are from the weary world, of the weary world, with the weary world. Jesus and his disciples are no different. Jesus is not from Jerusalem, the place of power, but from the little rural village of Galilee, like everyone else on the mountain that day. … These people are colonized by Romans, unprotected and even abused by their own ethnic government’s ruling. With these Beatitude moments, the crowd and Jesus who are from the weary world redefine what relationship the weary world has with God, and discover and affirm the space of a weary world differently.
These beautiful, lonely places and people: the streets and mountains. The unhoused folks. The housed folks. Everyone equally hungers for connection in their colonized places.
Marianne Sawicki states, in her book, Crossing Galilee, who Jesus was, (and who Jesus needs to be for us, the 21st century hearers.) Jesus was “Indigenous Galilean, transplanted Judean, dancing with Herodians and Romans. He is mestizo, culturally mixed, out-caste, transgressive of borders. This is why he can see things in new ways.”
This is why Jesus can see things in new ways, because Jesus is from the weary world, for the weary world, with the weary world. But take caution here. Jesus goes further than just being weary. His blessings are affirmatively and foremost about and for those who do not possess the power of choice to be weary or not to be weary. Some of us can choose to turn off the TV and put the newspaper back on the table, and continue their ordinary, low-fuss daily duties, since they have a choice to engage or disengage. But others don’t.
In fact, Jesus’ nine Beatitudes begin with “Blessed are Those who are Poor”, not “Blessed are those who are weary.”
Those who are weary, like many of us, still have a choice to be weary or not to be weary; to maintain ourselves in a lonely paradise or fight for righteousness. However, Jesus’ Beatitudes are affirmatively and prophetically and preferentially for those folks who lack “choices”:
Those who are poor. Those who mourn. Those who are hungry. Those who are persecuted for who they are and what they believe. Like in “Ella’s Song”: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”
These lonely, weary, rural village folks of Galilee, dream and affirm and redefine themselves: BLESSED are the weary, to be BELOVED, and therefore BELONG to the Kingdom of God. And these blessed folks invite us to see things in new ways like Jesus, the Mestizo, the unhoused, culturally mixed, out-caste, transgressive of borders. Jesus tells us that WE are called to a new way of life, the Kingdom of God, which is the way life and society would be, if a compassionate God were in charge, not the Roman governors.
One more thing to note: These weird, wild, blessing affirmations are happening through a transition. What transition, you may ask. Isn’t everyone in today’s reading sitting around Jesus, on the mountain that has stayed there and will be there for million of years? Where is the transition, and what kind of transition is happening?
Each statement of the Beatitudes might sound like a fridge-door magnet, a cozy reminder of God’s blessings. But each affirmation is genuinely revolutionary, because each of the blessings requires prophetic imagination. To see that the world is, already, (Jesus’ favourite narrative), shifting and turning around. The uneven playing field is levelling. Top and bottom are flipping; the left and the right are switching. The old way is dying, and the new age, new hope is rising up. The transition is already happening with God, in the weary world, and through the weary folks, who weep, who groan, who fight to shatter the chains of racism, slavery, human trafficking, exploitation of the Third World. They fight imperialism, and seek to bring peace. Women in this world are still being stoned (metaphorically or physically) under misogyny and patriarchy; human rights are unprotected and undermined for LGBTQ folks in the world.
A few years ago, the Advent season was coming, and I asked one of the church members, whom I could say was a wise sage (A pioneer in feminism in The United Church of Canada, I loved her. She showed me what Jesus’ love should be like. She died after that Advent season from a health complication, unexpectedly. I grieved.) “What message would you like to hear in this Advent season?”, and she responded, “Hope. I want to hear the message of Hope, Ha Na.”
I had another friend who influenced me deeply as my mentor and colleague. On some days she split time into 5-minute intervals to offer support to various individuals and groups in need, while teaching theology. I found that she often worked until midnight to do so. When asked why she worked so hard, she said, “Ha Na, too many are living in a lack of hope. The world suffers the lack of hope.”
The ordinary folks are often weary folks. The suffering may go deeper than just being weary too. We ache, we hunger, we mourn. We are hurt. “Poor in Spirit” is exactly that ― those who suffer from the lack of hope, if not the loss of it.
The new staff team of Broad View United and First Met “first met” and had meetings last summer to discuss what the new year’s theme would be for worship and programs, in 2023-24, and collectively discerned that Hope for a Weary World would journey with us like a guiding pillar. How can we, diverse communities, weave together a bojagi of hope? What can we do now to restore, or sing the “uprising of hope” (Thank you, Laura, for the great energy you filled our worship with today) to the future? To connect us to one another, hold one another, wrap one another in a gift of community, as if each one of us is a treasure to love?
I believe that our ongoing effort of community patchwork is like jogak-bo, a Korean patchwork wrapping cloth that gathers and holds all the odds and ends and come-short pieces of life’s diverse shapes and colours, and is the key to make any place less like a “lonely paradise” and more like a place that is hopeful for a shifting and turning, beloved possibility. Even if each of us might go through unspeakable hard times and daily oppressions, we are not alone. Truly, when we know that we are not alone, we can see a flower of wild hope growing and even prospering, banishing loneliness and leaving only paradise, connecting hope to hope.
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